From the SLD forums, someone who recently started SLD:
On vacation at my friend’s place in Dalarna Sweden. Used to live here some years ago and I´m now hanging out with all my old buddies, an jeeees… everything’s about food. BBQ´s, breakfast, snacks and lunch….? What´s this? Has food been so important before? Haven´t noticed that before, all food talk and all snacking. For fun I counted how often the word FOOD was used-25 times- during the day!!!
People who have heart disease are more likely to have gum problems. Why? According to an online health magazine from the University of Texas,
Medical researchers have two main theories to explain the link between gum disease and heart disease . . . One theory is that the bacteria from periodontal disease enter the blood stream and stick to the blood vessels, creating a thickening of the walls, which may end up clogging these vessels. The second theory is that the chemical by-products from gum disease cause the same clogging effect. The chemicals may come from the by-products of the bacteria or from the chemicals produced by the body’s own immune system.
A third possibility, not mentioned in the article, is that both gum disease and heart disease are caused by too much inflammation.
The three cases I described yesterday, in which high-omega-3 oils rapidly eliminated gum disease, convince me that the third possibility is correct. When you take 2 tablespoons/day flaxseed oil or 1 teaspoon/day fish oil, you are not killing the bacteria in your mouth. The bacteria remain as plentiful as ever. The difference is that your body is no longer overreacting to them. Plenty of evidence suggests that heart disease is caused by too much inflammation. This correlation is more evidence.
Why omega-3s reduce inflammation is known. The body requires omega-3 to build an anti-inflammatory signaling molecule. Not enough omega-3, not enough of this molecule, too much inflammation.
In honor of this week’s BMJ cover story.
My current test to study omega-3s (letter counting)nvolves lots of typing. To avoid carpal tunnel syndrome, which I started to approach a few weeks ago, I use one hand to raise the other one, as these pictures show.
Since I started doing this, I haven’t had any problems. No discomfort. I usually put an hour or more between tests. (Each test involves 200 keystrokes — 50/finger — in a few minutes.)
Deidre McCloskey and Lynn Conway — the subjects of my previous post on this topic — are both powerful persons. McCloskey is Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication, a title created just for her. In October 2007, she will receive an honorary degree from Goteborg University. Conway is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. McCloskey and Conway abused their power when they attacked Bailey.
As awful as their actions were, even worse is what Northwestern University administrators (led by Provost Lawrence Dumas) did: Let themselves be used as tools in the attack. McCloskey and Conway master-minded the filing of an absurd human-subjects complaint against Bailey — and Northwestern took it seriously! As Bailey says, it was “obvious to Northwestern officials” what McCloskey and Conway were trying to do (ruin Bailey) and why. It was like the teacher in a playground taking the side of the bully. Except worse, because Bailey could have been fired.
Kudos to Alice Dreger for shining light on a very unsavory episode in American academic history.
From a recent issue of JAMA:
Several lines of evidence from the study of patients with brain diseases converge on the prefrontal cortex (PFC), especially in the right hemisphere, as a critical area involved in the cognitive control of food intake. The PFC is the part of the brain that has undergone the biggest expansion during evolution, accounting for approximately one third of the surface of the human brain (Figure). Many complex aspects of behavior that distinguish humans from other species originate here, through the confluence of sensory, limbic, and autonomic information. Current theories on the PFC posit a crucial role for this region in the top-down control of behavior, especially under conflicting situations, when inappropriate responses need to be inhibited.
Diverse findings suggest a crucial role of the PFC in obesity. In the mid-1900s, overeating and weight gain were a common side effect in patients who underwent frontal leukotomy, a psychosurgical procedure that disconnects the frontal lobe from the rest of the brain. Damage to the right frontal lobe can cause a passion for eating and a specific preference for fine food, the so-called gourmand syndrome. In patients with degenerative dementia, the presence of hyperphagia correlates positively with right frontal atrophy and negatively with left frontal atrophy. . . . Hyperactivity of the right PFC can lead to anorexia-like symptoms, for example, in patients with right prefrontal focal epilepsy, in which the eating disorder can cease after initiation of anticonvulsant therapy.
Additional data support a link between the right PFC and spontaneous physical activity. . . . The right PFC is preferentially involved in guiding decision making according to social conduct and comprehension of bodily information at a higher level. . . . A dysfunction of the right PFC may represent a central event in the etiology of human obesity. . . . Increasing the activity of the right PFC might decrease appetite and reestablish inhibitory mechanisms controlling eating, as well as improve long-term adherence to interventions such as diet or exercise therapy, which is a major barrier that limits the success of any attempt to treat obesity.
No data to support this prediction are given. I think exercise and diet therapies usually fail because they are based on too-simple ideas about weight control. What does the gourmand syndrome reveal, I wonder.
Reference: The Right Brain Hypothesis for Obesity. Miguel Alonso-Alonso, MD, MPhil; Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD, PhD. JAMA. 2007;297:1819-1822.
The gum improvements produced by omega-3 fats can be easy to see:
1. About six months ago, my dentist noticed that my gums were in excellent shape (a healthy pink, not red), for the first time in memory. I had started taking 3-4 Tablespoons/day flaxseed oil a few months earlier. I hadn’t made other dietary changes nor had I started brushing or flossing my teeth more. I have slacked off the usual dental care (I floss less often) but my gums have remained in excellent shape, according to my dentist.
2. When Tyler Cowen (author of Discover Your Inner Economist) starting taking 2 Tablespoons/day flaxseed oil, his gums got much better within weeks. They improved so much surgery was canceled.
3. Catherine Shaffer, a Michigan writer, had the same experience with fish oil:
I bought a bottle of Carlson Laboratories [fish oil] and began taking the recommended dosage [1 teaspoon/day] . . . My gums have been chronically inflamed for as long as I can remember. They were reddish in color, had a tendency to bleed when poked, and have earned me many lectures on flossing from my dental hygenist. I have had to brush three times a day and floss twice to keep the inflammation down. However, as soon as I started taking the fish oil, my gums turned a pale pink, and I even though I have been very lazy about flossing, they have not been bleeding.
Maybe I should have called gingivitis (inflamed gums) the new scurvy. (Vitamin C cures scurvy in a few weeks.) Such fast big lasting improvements imply the flaxseed or fish oil supplied something important that was missing. Too much inflammation is a body-wide problem — many conditions end in -itis (e.g., arthritis) — so it is likely that the flaxseed or fish oil is having other benefits. Consistent with this idea, gum disease is correlated with several other health problems, including stroke, heart disease, and low-weight babies.
According to an online health-info source, echoing conventional wisdom:
Gingivitis is the most common and mildest form of oral/dental disease. According to the Food and Drug Administration, approximately 15 percent of adults between 21 and 50 years old, and 30 percent of adults over 50, have gum disease . . . The main cause of gingivitis is plaque . . . The best defense against gingivitis is brushing and flossing after meals, as well as professional cleaning by a dental hygienist every three to four months.
How fragile the conventional wisdom (“The main cause of gingivitis is plaque . . . The best defense . . . is brushing and flossing”) turns out to be. Eighty years ago, Weston Price, a Cleveland dentist, had the same doubts I do. In travels around the world, he saw many people with excellent teeth who never brushed them. They ate ancient diets, with far more omega-3 than modern food.
From the SLD forums:
I hoped it [the Shangri-La Diet] will work but still surprised it really does! . . . I had a piece of chocolate in the afternoon but not as much as normal.
Nicely put. I feel the same way — hopeful but still a little surprised. Hope and surprise go together. If you were sure something was going to happen, you wouldn’t hope for it, you’d expect it.
Curiously, hoping for something is more pleasant than expecting it. Compare “I hope to get a sweater for my birthday” and “I expect to get a sweater for my birthday.”
The theory behind the Shangri-La Diet says that food with unfamiliar flavor will be just as unfattening as food with no flavor (such as flavorless oil and sugar water). The Shangri-La Diet mentions using random spice combinations to get unfamiliar flavors.
I do this with smoothies. With smoothies there is no sense of loss — you’re not “ruining” something by randomly flavoring it. In my practice, “adding random spices” (also called crazy-spicing) means adding spices from three or four randomly-chosen spice mixes. It works great. Today I made a smoothie from crushed ice, plain yogurt, an egg, protein powder, powdered fiber, sugar, Splenda, Tabasco Sauce, vinegar, and, as I said, lots of four randomly-chosen spice mixes (Russian Sausage, Poultry Seasoning, etc.). Were I not in the middle of a flaxseed-oil experiment, I would have added flaxseed oil or some other oil. It tasted great.
As Michel Cabanac might say, pleasure is additive. This drink provides pleasure from these properties: creamy, protein, cool, liquid (satisfying thirst), sweet, salty (from the spice mixes), hot (Tabasco Sauce), spicy, sour. Nine sources, more than most food. They add up to a lot. It doesn’t matter that it tastes like nothing and that on a menu, no one would order it.
An hour later I thought: That tasted so good! But I was too full to want more.
I will be blogging more about that egg.
I learned about Blanchard’s typology of transsexuals from a draft of part of Bailey’s book that Bailey had posted on the Web. If correct, it is surely central to understanding male-to-female transsexuals.
I read Bailey’s draft a few months after reading Crossing (1999), a memoir by Deirdre McCloskey, a professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Crossing tells the story of McCloskey’s change from man to woman. It is an emotionally powerful book, full of longing. According to Crossing and Bailey’s draft, McCloskey had at least three features in common with Type 2 transsexuals (worked in male-dominated profession (economist), married, changed sex after age 40). Crossing also describes being sexually aroused by cross-dressing. This appeared consistent with Blanchard’s typology — which Crossing didn’t mention. Why not? I felt deceived. I wrote to McCloskey to complain: Shouldn’t you have mentioned Blanchard’s ideas? Her reply: Do you believe everything you read on the internet?
No, but I believed Blanchard was a serious scientist. I did not know Bailey but he wrote extremely well. The draft I had read was brilliant science journalism. I liked Bailey’s own research, too, which was about how gay and straight men differ. Blanchard could be wrong but to discuss transsexualism at book length without mentioning him seemed like writing a book about France without mentioning Paris.
Part 1. Alice Dreger’s paper about the Bailey “controversy”.
After The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism by Michael Bailey was published, several transsexuals started an extraordinary defamation campaign against Bailey. The story of this campaign, including interviews, is told in the new paper by Alice Dreger that I mentioned in earlier posts on this topic (Part 1, Part 2).
The defamation campaign was led by professors. They claimed Blanchard’s typology of transsexuals was false, of course, but never clearly explained why. Bailey’s crime wasn’t that his book spread falsehoods; it was that it spread a truth they didn’t want spread.
One of those professors was Deidre McCloskey, the author of Crossing. She wrote an amazing review of Bailey’s book. From her review:
Almost everyone in the scientific study of sex and gender has checked and balanced and resisted the Clarke Institute’s [Blanchard worked at the Clarke Institute] theory. It has proven to be wrong and has been laid aside by the mainstream of gender researchers.
Who are these “almost everyone”? McCloskey never says. And it’s a long review.
Lynn Conway, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, constructed a website called “An investigation into the publication of J. Michael Bailey’s book on transsexualism by the National Academies”. This big website has little to say about Blanchard’s typology other than this, written by Conway:
It is unfalsifiable (note: any trans woman who reports that she doesn’t fit the classifications is explained by the “theory” as being a “liar”). Furthermore, the scheme has no predictive capabilities. Thus it is thus untestable.
Well, which is it? “Proven wrong” by “almost everyone” (McCloskey) or “unfalsifiable” and without “predictive capabilities” and “untestable” (Conway)? McCloskey and Conway must have talked many times. This discrepancy in how they attacked Blanchard’s theory shows how little they cared about its truth — or that they knew it was true.
For people engaged in what they called a noble cause (defending transsexuals), McCloskey and Conway showed a remarkable disinclination to tell Dreger what they had done. Dreger tried hard to interview both of them.
McCloskey gave Dreger some brief email answers and then
refused to tell me anything more substantial unless I first proved to her, by showing her what I was writing, that I agreed with her position.
As for Conway, Dreger was unable to reach her at the University of Michigan. Finally she called Conway at home:
We had a phone call that lasted about a minute (August 16, 2006). She surprised me by being extremely hostile at the outset. She also would not answer a question about whether she was willing to speak to me on the record. This confused me — why would she not just tell me whether or not she wanted to speak on the record. I said as much. She responded that it was very strange that I would call her at home. I told her how many other ways I had tried to reach her with no response before finally calling her home. She then said that I was stalking her and added that she would circulate this fact widely.